Practical strategies for the role of digital in your business

Google Analytics and Newsletters

One of the great things about digital, for me, is its measure-ability. Do you send regular emails to your clients? How many of those that opened your email bought your product or rang you up?

Today I was working on an integration between a common email marketing tool (mailchimp) and Google Analytics for one of my clients who has an e-commerce website.

Most email marketing tools will give you insight into how many people received your email, how many opened it and how many clicked through to your website. Many business also might use Google Analytics as a free tool to see how many people came to their website. Their success is measured by the rise and fall of visitor numbers only. But Google Analytics could provide you with some great actionable insights that can help you create better campaigns and write better emails.

All too often the trail goes dead after you have looked at your email marketing tool’s insight report. But this is where Google Analytics (GA) would come in. For my client recently I set up a successful integration between Mailchimp and GA. I can now see how many people “actually” ended up on the website and what they did there. Did they buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or create an account? I am now able to assign some monetary success to their emails. An email was sent to 200 people, 30 ended up on their website and spent $300. The same email was sent to another list of 100 people and nobody went to the website.

How exciting! They now can see which list responds the best. This could be a trigger to start testing if the non-responsive people need a different email message perhaps. It’s very early days for this client, but they are now set up to get insights out of their emails beyond “how many people opened it”. Opening the email is only half the challenge, people need to take “action” right? In the case of this client the “action” is a purchase.

So use these free tools to get the free insights that can help you make more money, for free J